A datacenter is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. To handle increasing volumes of data, optical fiber is replacing copper wire. A major disadvantage of copper is the power consumption of transceivers. Due to the digital processing needed to make a copper solution work, a copper transceiver may consume up to 5-6 W of power. This is almost ten times as much as a fiber optic transceiver that consumes only 0.5-1 W.
VCSELs (Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Lasers) are a type of semiconductor laser diode with laser beam emission perpendicular from the wafer surface, contrary to conventional edge-emitting semiconductor lasers (also in-plane lasers) which emit from surfaces formed by cleaving the individual chip out of a wafer. VCSELs may be used as a light source for optical fiber data transmission.